The latter half of the twentieth century has been witness to a phenomenon known as the information revolution. While the information revolution is a historical development broader in scope than any one event or machine, the decreasing cost of information technology has undoubtedly been revolutionary. These decreases, in turn, have driven productivity increases in a snowballing effect as product designs, manufacturing processes, resource scheduling, administrative chores, and many other factors, are made more efficient. As a result of these benefits, information technology now plays a critical role in virtually every organization.
Many organizations have discovered that the total cost of processing information is not limited to the cost of the hardware and software used to perform the tasks. It also includes the cost of human resources devoted to install and maintain the IT systems and, perhaps more significantly, the lost productivity costs incurred when IT systems fail. As IT systems and their applications have become mission-critical, many organizations now employ teams of skilled IT administrators to manage their IT resources. One problem that these organizations encounter, however, is that it is prohibitively expensive to assign an administrator to monitor every piece of critical equipment 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
One partial solution to this problem is to have the IT systems send out an email to an administrator should a problem arise. The administrator who receives the email can then diagnose and resolve the problem. One problem with this solution, however, is that that there can be significant delay between the time the administrator receives the email and the time they actually read it, particularly when the triggering condition occurs at night or during holidays. Moreover, even after the administrator reads the email, they may still need to travel to the problem site before they can fix the problem. For many mission-critical applications, even a few minutes of downtime can cause millions of dollars worth of losses.
Another problem with conventional notification systems is that they do not ensure that the proper administrator received the alert and is going to take action to solve the problem. Another problem with conventional systems is that they frequently send the emergency emails to an administrator who is at home or on another service call, even though there are other, available administrators who can respond to the problem as effectively. Yet another problem with email solutions is that they only provide asynchronous communications. Accordingly, there is no real-time feedback possible to the system from the administrator indicating the administrator's ability to do anything about the problem.
Without a means to improve the response to IT problems, the promise of the information technology revolution may never be fully achieved.